Lill' of everything

So the last week and a half has been full with so much different stuff... 

We were all invited for a high school football game with Victors host family last weekend and that was definitely a CRAZY experience...! It was the team's last home game this year so everyone was like crazy much into it... I don't really know the rules of American football but I did get that both parents, grandparents, cheer-leaders, pets and students were a lot into it. With a huge group of smiley-face cheerleaders, a big orchestra and a full station the culture about school sport is a completely different world from Denmark... :)

We have also visited the library in Seattle downtown, which is a doubtlessly a great piece of architecture. 

And finished off eating in China-town. Actually it is called the International District of Seattle, however a local guy told us that it is just to be ethical correct - cause it is mainly populated by Chinese people! 

 This weekend we were invited for a Haloweenparty at Edmonds Community College and as Americans are quite a lot into Haloween we all had to dress up....

This is one of my neighbors, which tells a bit about the standard of Haloween... 

And yesterday Laurids, Benjamin and I went to a Haloween-party at one of Benjamin's host brothers friends house and I have never seen anything like that. There entire house was changed into a horror house with a cemetery, devil-alters in the bathrooms, eyeball snacks, spiderweb, tons of pumpkins, gross dolls and so on. Haloween is definitely not just a lame joke here!!! 

And then we were out hiking in the twilight landscape yesterday as well. It was quite a wet trip but still quite beautiful

 And of course when we are forced to be together sort of all the time, you sort of learn how to love them... Yes, 2.y is growing stronger and stronger and cooler and cooler for everyday that passes :)

Vancouver babyyyy

Well, I never got to write anything about Vancouver so here there is a little bit…

“Vancouver er som den beste byen noensinne, er det nesten som Skandinavia, så rik og grønt!" after a four hour bus ride from Seattle that was one of the first things we were met by. A Norwegian lady saw the five confused Danish chicks walking dumbly with trolleys, umbrellas, and huge maps and became our rescue. Besides that she kept on saying something like Vancouver was a much better city than Seattle and quite wealthy, which was something we definitely came to question shortly after. Vancouver was indeed a very beautiful city and it did resemble Denmark a lot but I had not expected to see so many homeless pot-smoking people. Everywhere we went even outside the huge shopping centers people were huddled into blankets and begging for leftovers or money. It is quite complex to comprehend that a well-educated, wealthy and developed nation as Canada has such a huge gap between rich and poor and of cause it touched us. So we decided at a point to give a sandwich to one of the homeless people we passed. However, when we passed him later, the sandwich was laying next to him completely untouched…

Unfortunatly God had decided that this should be the most rainy weekend of the year (or at least it felt like that!), which signified that we all weekend was strolling around in pools. Therefore we didn’t get to go hiking as planned but in stead we wandered around in Vancouver and it was actually a quite great city with plenty of tower blocks and loads of fast-food shops! Starbucks had basically taken over the town!

One of the days we ate breakfast in one of the hotels, in which we were able to see the view over Vancouver, super beautiful as you see!

On our way home we were again confronted with American security. It took us like an hour to get through security at the border and we all had to show passports and hand in all our food… Americans just don’t like strangers, huh? J

Chicken soup with dumbling = hønsekødssuppe? :O

Now when we have been here a little longer we have been so lucky that we have experienced the American way of cooking Danish food – or at least their attempt to J. Laurids and I ended in Niron’s house one day after school and it appeared that his host dad apparently truly appreciates cooking – and of course Niron had given him a Danish cooking book. 

He seemed quite lost in his pots and pans when we arrived, so I guess he saw us as a bless from heaven – he probably expected that three Danish kids would be able to cook their national food… So what he did was to leave us with the recipe in the company of a Chinese guy... And when we finally got to the recipe we were quite surprised to see that it wanted us to make dumplings…?! But luckily we were endowed with this Chinese guy so we sort of asked him to make Chinese dumplings with meat (didn’t really consider that it wasn’t very Danish). 

And this guy started cooking, pretty good at it actually… But of course we then realized that the dumpling the recipe was talking about was supposed to be “melboller” - and we were forced to change our plans... When the host-dad came back home and finished up the food he was stunned – apparently he had thought he was making frikadeller… J Well, chicken soup it turned out to be but I swear, I have never tried anything like that in Denmark… We didn’t dare saying that though so if the Danish cuisine is getting a bad reputation after this, we are not all innocent… 

Size does matter...

So, now we have been here almost two weeks and unfortunatly I'm haven't been the best in keeping my blog updated... Sorry, everything has been so busy but without doubt great too! 

The first week passed  by pretty fast with getting to know the family, the school, how to get around with busses (although I'm not so unlucky that I have to take the bus to school in DK, I have truly come to admire the Danish bus system. Us Danes know how to rule that kind of stuff! Here the busses arrive everything in between on time and 10 minutes after... They have taught their bus drivers how to say hi though - seems like Danish bus drivers don't really possess that skill...) and stuff like that.

Edmonds Community College is as we were "warned" about a very asian populated school. The canteen is crammed with asians noodles... It is a bit of an experience though and they seem extremely friendly. However, we have all our classes seperately, which means that we so far haven't interacted that much with the other students. The whole thing about going to school over here is so different though - we barely have any classes... Some days we meet at 10.30 and are off around 2.30 and within that amount of time we have a big lunch break + a study lab period. And our host families apparently think that the school is pushing us hard - giving us too many sciences + classes...?! 

Last weekend I met some of the most interesting people I have met long… Benjamin’s host family appeared to be this awesome family that has been all over the world and hosted students from basically everywhere. They had so many different stories and experiences to share and along with the longhaired 25-year old son (a real college-drop out J) they were babbling all night about everything from weed, to strange Russians to their hates on Mid Romney… Those weird Russians appeared to be exchange students they had had before the wall fell - quite interesting people those kids seemed to be...! :)

I was amazed by how open-minded and welcoming that family is – so maybe Kelli is right, some Americans are just more extrovert than us reserved “jante-lovs” Danes.

Saturday we were invited for a Canadian Thanksgiving, which was quite interesting. Victor’s hostmom is apparently Canadian and instead of celebrating the American thanksgiving, she is having a party on the 6^th of October every year to celebrate the “harvest” – or at least it was supposedly what the Canadians celebrated traditionally. So their house was smarten up with fancy Canadian flags and symbols and full of tons of different people – some of them completely dressed up in the Canadian colors.  So we ended up having a great night with meeting loads of cool people and tried tons of odd food.

 After having discussed the benefits of providing bullied kids games (WOW, LOL and that kind of games, although I’m not quite so experienced on that field I appeared to have an opinion… J) with a, not to be prejudiced, typical gaming guy, whom studied game-technology and development at a uni somewhere, we were even invited for dinner sometimes next week by a hypnotist… whom appeared to be his mother… So it was definitely a different night... :)

Besides that I learned, that as a kid my age you should NOT introduce yourself to other youngster by hand greeting… Couldn’t initially really figure out why they looked so strangely at us when we offered our lovely hands…  Sorta felt as the formal too polite mama’s kids from a little outmoded Scandinavian country… ;)

So tomorrow I am going downtown Seattle for the first time – feel a little embarrassed about not having been there yet after almost two weeks…! Anyways, the school is supposed to take us around and show us the sights of Seattle. And then Saturday I’ll leave for Vancouver with a couple of people - already gave up the hope about seeing "free-Willy" whales tho... :)

So everyone, have a great weekend and enjoy Denmark, the rain and the lovelaay “daily life” – I’m sure Vancouver will miss you ;) 

PS. Watch this and imagine that it's created by some danish dudes that just think they are Norwegian - the content is so true! :) 

So Seattle...?

Is so far... GREAT!

But after an 11 hours flight full of expectations, excitement, chatting, ambitions, sharing of fears and almost no sleep, I did not feel it was that great to be arriving... 

Uh, btw. I got to see Greenland for the first time and as you see that great Danish property is not a bad sight!

But as I mentioned, as my mind was so hazy that I didn’t even know whether I was excited about finally getting out in the socalled land of honey and milk or not... The group from last year had before I left Denmark tried to convince me that I definitely would start feeling crept out around half an hour before arrival – but I felt, well actually I felt nothing at all. I didn’t know whether I was excited or not, the only thing I was certain about was that I looked forward to Danish "Julekalender"... :) So you see walking out of the plane to the American ground seemed quite unrealistic to me. And with the sun shining and almost 25 degrees celcius we could basically have arrived anywhere but Washington that is supposed to be the most rainy state in America. But Washington it was…

One of the stereotypes of Americans are probably that they are extremely careful and suspicious regarding foreigners coming into the country - and the Washington Americans appeared to be no different pretty quickly after we arrived in the airport. All 30 of us had to go through security and VISA check, which was as bad as I had dreaded. I was sure that travelling 29 students together would be no less than a mess it actually went quite well. Or at least until this very nice druggie-dog with its however friendly police-buddy found two meat-ball (frikadeller) sandwiches in two different peoples' bag. Guess we all are gonna miss the sight of those so much that we had to smuggle it in... 

That caused that both of them had to go through one more security check and received a warning – guess we all learned from that, that bringing meat into America can result in a fine that involves like 300 $... J

just the way it is... 

When we finally got out we were met by this lovelaaay lady and her companion Jesse. Julie is in charge of our program and I have already learned that she must be my new best friend! She KNOWS basically anything about what to do around here, so that’s quite practical to have a friend like that (don’t talk about abusing here…) ;)

They took us to Edmonds Community College where we had to line up and wait for a host family to pick us… It sort of made me think of the orphanages in Denmark back in time, in which wealthy people came and selected the kid they liked the most. Anyway, someone picked me, so I guess someone liked me and before long I was in an American home in the suburb to Seattle called Mukilteo. I tell you though that I was a little scared when I opened the door and the first thing that met me was a 6 meter long exhibition of small dolls – and not just haloween dolls… And from upstairs I could see a small little collection of teddies peaking out. I guess this is where I have to say that this family does NOT have small children… :)

From the letter I had received just before leaving I had understood that I was going to live with a single mom named Barbara and her two children at 19 and 22 respectively. I’m sorry but I have to disappoint all the ones that have been writing to me to figure out whether the 19 year old "supposed to be elite-swimmer" guy is hot… Firstly, he has never been an elite swimmer. Secondly, he doesn’t live at home and thirdly: well, I have just met him today and he is not gonna come back and visit while I'm here again. The mom is however still named Barbara and she seems very nice. However, something like this popped into my mind when she on our way home in the car said that she was quite conservative...

However, we have already discussed alcohol + drugs + relationships, which she is quite open about, and she is thinking about reading the book “Fifty shades” so I guess she can’t be that conservative… :) 

Her daughter, Shannon, lives here as well. I haven’t seen her much though as she works late every day. Furthermore, I have gotten a Taiwanese host sister named Kristine and luckily she speaks amazingly English! :)

I guess one of my biggest prejudices against America was the fatty food and therefore I was naturally surprise when one of the first things Barbara told me about was her focus on eating and being healthy. That sort of ligthened up my worst fear, however, I rapidly came to the realization, that the American definition of staying healthy is quite different from the Danish... Or at least I was forced to acknowledge that when we got a sticky burger with tons of cheese and white bread as my welcome dinner... :)

Another prejuices I guess have already been confirmed is Americans’ relationship to TV. My host family is supposed to be in the “healthy” end of the TV-habits and their TV is turned on every night from around 7 to 11pm – and according to some random teenagers in a bus that is nothing…?!

 Sorry, now I sound a little too critical! This area is AMAZING and I’m nothing but excited about having 2 months left here - although it might signify fries, burger and TV every day ;)

Barbara took Laurids (he lives like next door), Kristine and I hiking on the Sunday after we arrived and although I’m not a very big twilight fan, I think referring to those movies is the best way to describe what Washington nature looks like… J As you can see on the picture it is a real twilight scenario ;)

And this is my host mom Barbara Gardner and Kristine Ivy my taiwanese host sister 

Don't know why it is not raining - that was like the only thing I was certain about before arriving, but this year Washington has decided to be sunny... :)

 

 Laurids and Kristine

 

And my room that is 10 times as big as my room back home, so I don't complain at all! 











Anyways, I'll go back to the American life. Hope you all have a great weekend! :)


xx